You can also get a copy of the issue for $3.99, or, better yet, buy a year’s subscription for $35.88 – which is a savings of about 25% off the cover price.

I had a horrible time trying to figure out a title for this story. That’s not one of my skills to begin with – thus the questionable titles for many of my pieces – but this one was particularly difficult. I finally submitted the piece under the title “The Doors,” only to have the editor, John Joseph Adams, tell me that the title was not very good.

I couldn’t argue the point, and focused on coming up with more titles. Alas, the Lightspeed editors were equally unenthusiastic about:

“You Are Incapable of Summing Up This Story with a Decent Title”

“For the World Is Hollow and I Can’t Think of a Title”

and the one I still kinda regret not going with

“Hamlet, Because That’s Been a Pretty Successful Play, and Maybe the Title Is Why”

Also just going live, the latest issue of Lightspeed, available for subscribers or as an individual issue, which includes my short story, “Deathlight,” along with new short stories by An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, and Wole Talabi, reprints from a number of well known names including Tim Pratt and Elizabeth Hand, and Hugh Howey’s “The Plagiarist.”

I may have a bit more to say about this one once my individual story goes live on the web on May 17, but for now, I’ll just note that the two stories are, I think, quite different – and not just because one is more or less fantasy (if a bit snarky about it) and the other marks my return to hard science fiction.

Just in time for some weekend reading, new magazine Metaphorosis has launched, with my short story, Cat Play.

It’s fantasy, but set in a very real place here in Winter Garden. (The coffee shop is also real – it’s the Starbucks down at the Winter Garden Village.) Partly, this was sheer laziness – using real places means I don’t have to think up imaginary ones. But I rather like the idea of a touch of magic hanging out in ordinary apartment complexes.

My short story, Ink, just went live up at the Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, brought to you by the same people who have brought you Unlikely Entomology and Unlikely Architecture, and who are partly financially backed by a group organized out of the very unlikely Sealand. Given all of these factors, it’s rather unlikely that this story managed to appear at all; I hope you enjoy reading it.